52 Weeks on the Lough: May 2012

Saturday, 19 May 2012

Week 20... Sunday 13 May 2012....

Kilnasaggart Standing Stone:

Kilnasagaart: Cill na Saggart' which means the 'church of the priest' is an early Christian inscribed standing stone in South Armagh in the townland of... that's right you guessed it... Kilnasaggart. At almost 2m tall, the Stone is regarded as being one of the oldest inscribed stones in Ireland. It stands on the ancient road which ran from Tara in County Meath and through the Moyry Pass to Dunseverick Head on the North Antrim Coast (Sighe Midhlachra).

It has a total of 13 crosses on its faces and the inscription, ‘This place, bequeathed by Temoc, son of Ceran Bic, under the patronage of Peter, the Apostle.’ Temoc’s death was recorded around 714, which sets the stone in the 8th century. Excavations at the site in 1966 and 1968 revealed an early Christian graveyard with graves oriented radially around the pillar and facing towards the rising sun. It is thought that a church was probably located nearby.

I shot the stone from the usual standpoints and the fast rising sun behind me has left the original pictures a little over exposed and harsh...

Kilnasaggart Pillar Stone

In order to get something out of my morning's work I felt the need to add a starburst using some techniques in photoshop.... I hope you like them...

Light breaks above Kilnasaggart Pillar Stone

Week 20 on the Lough.....Sunday 13 May 2012

Sunrise at the Clermont Pass

The Clermont Pass is a mountain road across the Ravensdale/Cooley Mountains - the construction project was started as a famine relief project in 1846 and completed in 1872. This morning I was on top of the mountain at 05:30am and found myself waiting for another sunrise that never quite delivered.....

The sun slowly rises above the hills above Rostrevor....

On Golden Pond...

Slieve Foye from Clermont at Dawn

Instead of focusing on the large panoramas which were a little disappointing I focused on some of the details I found on the mountain and looked at some distant viewpoint from my elevated position:

Heath on Clermont at sunrise

Stone Stack on Clermont at sunrise

Week 20 on the Lough... Saturday 12 May 2012...
Bluebells at NarrowWater Wood....

This week's Spring In Pictures is dedicated to that most iconic of spring flora, the bluebell. I wrote last week about how they are one of my favourite blasts of colour during spring early summer... This year I spotted my first bluebell in Tollymore Forest Park during my visit on Firday 16 March... in my opinion this was tremendously early but the swathes of blues bells at NarrowWater Wood are a site to behold....

I used My usual Pentax K10D and 5D with an assortment of lenses to capture the results above including: a Sigma AF 105mm f/2.8 EX DG macro; Sigma AF 8-16mm f/4.5-5.6 DC HSM; Pentax SMC F 50mm 1.7; and finally a Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 XR Di LD...... I also discovered my K10D was suffering from tremendous backfocus issues... which I hopefully have now fixed thanks to photographyrulez.blogspot

Despite a very early rise 05:00am .. I returned home for my tea 'n toast a very happy boy....I shot some footage on my phone of the woods and my set up which you can view here.

Enjoy

Sunday, 13 May 2012

Jim Richardson on Travel and Landscape Photography -- National Geographic

A man after my own heart!! LOL Jim Richardson on Travel and Landscape Photography -- National Geographic

Saturday, 12 May 2012

Week 20 - Saturday 12 May 2012.... HDR?? or No HDR???

Dawn at Dusk...

This photograph has been uploaded to this blog before but I wasn't entirely happy with it - I plugged it into a High Dynamic rage programme (Photomatix Pro 4.0) and below you see the results:

Photo No.1 is the original Raw file exposed at F11 @ 1/6 sec. I used my Pentax K10D and my Sigma AF 8-16mm f/4.5-5.6 DC HSM (DX) to grab this super wide shot of a little fishing boat at Greencastle, Co.Down. the original photograph has it charms - I love the colour of the sky and the soft delicate nature of the pink clouds on the left hand side of the picture. The boat however appears to be under exposed (even after a touch of fill light in Lightroom)

Dawn at Dusk F11@1/6Sec

Nice but I thought there was more detail in the photograph!! I loaded three photographs into Photomatix the first obviously being the image above (F11@1/6 Sec) the other two were shot using multi-exposure on the camera at +1Stop and -1Stop (F11@ 1Sec and F11@ 1/20Sec)

I used the painterly settings which usually creates an absolutely horrible mess of a picture but today I tweaked the settings significantly to create the image below: the sky has lost some of the subtly and has a harsh highlight just to the left of the boat but the foreground has improved significantly showing the flowers plants and smaller green boat which was all but absent from the earlier photograph....

Dawn at Dusk F11@1/6Sec (HDR- 3 photo image)

As with all HDR work I feel like I've cheated a little bit :-0 and I still prefer the sky in the original image - but this comparision shows there are benefits to be had by pulling the detail from images either side of the 'ideal exposure'

Interested in your comments/preferences

Monday, 7 May 2012

Rock Climbing Picture - Yosemite Photo - National Geographic Photo of the Day

Fantastic picture of a rock climber in Yosemite.... Rock Climbing Picture - Yosemite Photo - National Geographic Photo of the Day

Sunday, 6 May 2012

Week 19 - Monday 30 April

Sunset at Clontygora....

Sometimes when we go to photograph a site we can be drawn into the challenge of capturing the mass... but the details can sometimes make the most interesting photographs.... This little wild flower nodding in the wind made it a well worth while visit to one of my usual haunts..